Wednesday 29 June 2016

At your low point

At your low point you are no longer distinct from your fellow beings.
You are not ashamed and do not regret it, since insofar as you live the life of your fellow beings and descend to their lowliness / you also climb into the holy stream of common life, where you are no longer an individual on a high mountain, but a fish among fish, a frog among frogs.
Your heights are your own mountain, which belongs to you and you alone. There you are individual and live your very own life.
If you live your own life, you do not live the common life, which is always continuing and never-ending, the life of history and the inalienable and ever-present burdens and products of the human race.
There you live the endlessness of being, but not the becoming. Becoming belongs to the heights and is full of torment.
How can you become if you never are?
Therefore you need your bottommost, since there you are. But therefore you also need your heights, since there you become.
If you live the common life at your lowest reaches, then you become aware of your self.
If you are on your heights, then you are your best, and you become aware only of your best, but not that which you are in the general life as a being.
What one is as one who becomes, no one knows. But on the heights, imagination is at its strongest.
For we imagine that we know what we are as developing beings, and even more so, the less we want to know what we are as beings.
Because of that we do not love the condition of our being brought low; although or rather precisely because only there do we attain clear knowledge of ourselves.
C. G. Jung. The Red Book.

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